1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to displaying content retrieved from a server in a computer network by a user using a browser application on a client device, and more specifically to a system, method, and program for enabling transitory content that has been dynamically displayed within the browser to be redisplayed to the user at the user's command.
2. Description of the Related Art
The Internet, initially referred to as a collection of “interconnected networks”, is a set of computer networks, possibly dissimilar, joined together by means of gateways that handle data transfer and the conversion of messages from the sending network to the protocols used by the receiving network. When capitalized, the term “Internet” refers to the collection of networks and gateways that use the TCP/IP suite or protocols.
Currently, the most commonly employed method of transferring data over the Internet is to employ the World Wide Web environment, referred to herein as “the Web”. Other Internet resources exist for transferring information, such as File Transfer Protocol (FTP) and Gopher, but have not achieved the popularity of the Web. In the Web environment, servers and clients effect data transfer using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), a known protocol for handling the transfer of various data files (e.g., text, still graphic images, audio, motion video, etc.).
A Web browser on the client enables a user to specify a Web location through a displayed link or by inputting the URL of the location. The Web browser sends the URL request using the HTTP protocol which defines the way in which the Web browser and the Web server communicate with one another. The request is sent to the Internet which determines which server to send the request to. A Web server receives the request using the HTTP protocol; and sends the requested home page, document, or object to the Web browser client. The content is displayed on the client's computer screen through the Web browser.
In some situations, the requested content will contain other embedded objects that are specified by a different URL. These other objects may be located at a different server than the server at which the originally requested content resides. After receiving the originally requested content and a URL of an embedded object, the Web browser sends out a request to the Internet for this other object. The Web browser then embeds this other object/content into the original document as specified by the HTML tags in the original document.
When a user is browsing or accessing Web pages, the Web browser itself, and/or the Web pages being accessed, may include advertisements, or promotional or informational messages. The words “banner advertisements” or “messages” or “ads” will be used interchangeably herein to refer to these advertisements or messages. Typically, banner advertisements are displayed in some portion of the browser or in a separate window other than the window displaying the requested content. An Internet Service Provider (ISP) or On Line Service may cause banner advertisements to be displayed on the client's Web browser independently of any specific content or Web page being accessed. That is, the messages are not associated with or dictated by the content being displayed and thus appear to be randomly generated.
Advertisements can also appear within a given portion of a Web page. Owner's of Web pages may sell banner space within their Web page to advertisers to generate revenue. Owner's of Web pages may also utilize their own advertising. Also, owners of search engines generate revenue by displaying banner advertisements on their home page and along with any displayed search results. Sometimes the content of the banner advertisements are geared to a targeted audience as made evident by the subject matter being searched or by information that may be accessible in cookies stored at the client.
The HTML structure of Web documents in general enables advertisements or other objects to be embedded within a Web page or document. To take advantage of this feature, some Web sites configure their pages such that there is a consistent area on each page where advertisements are displayed. Web page content is then formatted around these predefined areas. Typically, the predefined area has its own URL which is different than the URL used to get the Web page content. The URL for the predefined area usually retrieves an advertisement from a server especially designed to deliver advertisements. As such, when a first URL is used to request a new page from a given Web site, the URL for the predefined area is used to get an advertisement to be displayed in the predefined area. The advertisement is placed in the same position on the Web page, and the content that was retrieved may be modified to fit around this advertisement area. The advertisement server may provide a different advertisement even though the same URL for the advertisement server is being used. As such, each time the same Web page is accessed, a different advertisement may appear. The displayed messages may appear to be dynamically or randomly generated. As such, these banner advertisements are referred to herein as being dynamically and/or randomly generated. That is, a same advertisement does not necessarily appear each time a same Web page is accessed.
The dynamic and random nature of advertisements can be caused by any one of several factors. For example, the embedded object containing advertisement content may be a multimedia object. Not only is such a multimedia object enabled to contain a sequence of static frames played at a given number of frames per second to give a moving picture affect, but the multimedia object may contain a sequence of different advertisements displayed one after the other. Also, as a user accesses different Web pages, each web page may display different advertisements. Also, for a given URL for an embedded object within a given Web page, a server can be constantly changing the advertisement content associated with the given URL. This enables the server to bring in advertising dollars from as many different advertisers as possible by dispersing advertising time and space for any given highly visited Web site amongst the many different advertisers.
It should be noted that although the term randomly generated is used because the advertisements may be different each time a same page is accessed, they may not be truly randomly generated by the advertisement server. That is, the advertisement server may have a very specific algorithm for determining which advertisement to send depending upon a time of the request, the content being requested, and/or one or more attributes of the requester. In other words, target advertising may be used to gear certain advertising to certain types of users at certain times of the day and for certain types of content being requested. In this respect, the advertising is not randomly generated, but generated pursuant to a specific algorithm. Nevertheless, the term randomly generated or dynamically generated is used interchangeably to mean that the advertisement may change independently of any changed or unchanged Web page content. In other words, different requests for a given URL for a specific Web page will not necessarily result in a same advertisement being displayed within that Web page each time that it is requested and rendered to the display.
As such, if a user “misses” an advertisement, the user may not necessarily be able to just request the same Web page and expect to get back the same advertisement that was previously rendered with a previous rendering of that Web page.
In addition, not only are these advertisements dynamically and randomly generated as discussed above, but these advertisements or messages also appear and disappear very quickly on the display screen. As such, they are also referred to herein as being transient or transitory banner advertisements or messages.
As such, these dynamically generated transient advertisements have an inherent problem as made evident in the situation where a user may be interested in a promotional message at a particular instance. Because these messages appear and disappear rather quickly, by the time a user tries to select a particular promotional message link, the message may have already flashed by as a different message appears. Hence, the user misses the desired links. This can be especially problematic for users having physical or mental disabilities that hinder the user from being able to respond quickly to these transient messages. As discussed above, because of the dynamic and random nature of the advertisements, a user can not just request the original document again and expect to see the same advertisement embedded therein. Consequently, a specific advertiser that the user was initially interested in may have lost a potential customer.
For example, FIG. 1A displays a Web page 100 with a message 101 appearing above the article to enroll in a Merryll Lynch program. FIG. 1B displays the same Web page 100 with a different message 102 appearing above the article to apply for a Yahoo/Visa card. The Yahoo/Visa message in FIG. 1B appears quickly, and thus the Merryll Lynch message in FIG. 1A is missed.
One solution to help users deal with transitory advertisements is called Banner Console by i-LOR; and it is described on the World Wide Web at i-lor.com/bannerconsole. A tool is added to a banner ad that allows the user to click once to enable the user to return to the banner ad later. The banner ad is saved and its image is listed in a separate window for later selection by a user. Multiple ads can be selected. Each ad selected by the user is added to the list of ads in the separate window.
Another solution is provided in copending patent application Ser. No. 09/561,181, filed Apr. 27, 2000, titled “METHOD, SYSTEM AND PROGRAM FOR SAVING OBJECT CONTENT IN A REPOSITORY FILE” and commonly assigned to IBM Corporation in which a displayed advertisement object can be selected by a user and appended to a repository file of similarly selected objects.
A problem with the above solutions, however, is that they require that a user view each ad as it is quickly displayed in order to make the decision of whether or not the user may want to view it later. This distracts the user from the current Web page that was requested by the user. The above solutions also do not solve the problem of a user reading the requested page content and missing an advertisement by not clicking on it.